Movie review: 'The Hunting Party'

2 1/2 stars (out of four)

The title of “The Hunting Party” doesn’t evoke much in particular. “War Correspondents Gone WILD!” would be more like it if the film itself—messy, but fairly stimulating—had more of the scamp in its soul.

Writer-director Richard Shepard’s adventure raises a good question. How many tonalities can an adventure/comedy/drama/your-genre-here profitably blend and still come out sounding like music? Here’s another one: Is a movie always better off trying to make the audience care about the characters?

We’ll take that second one first. The answer is no. A movie is not always better off trying to make the audience care. If the director traffics in the realm of black comedy, any attempts to win us over or encourage sympathy or empathy with the rollicking hell-raisers on screen tend to give off a bad odor.

Based on a breezy Esquire article by Scott Anderson, “The Hunting Party” plants us in the heavily mythologized land of the weary war correspondent. Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) is a former network hotshot who melted down during a live dispatch from Bosnia. (There’s a grim secret behind the breakdown.) After his fall from televised grace the correspondent has scrambled around the globe filing boilerplate dispatches for far-flung TV stations.

Five years later in Sarajevo, ace cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard, good as always but laden with voice-over chores) unexpectedly reunites with his fellow globe-trotter. Simon engages him in a long-shot mission: to locate and capture, for enormous reward money, the Bosnian Serb fugitive known as “The Fox.” (The genocidal quarry is based on the real-life Radovan Karadzic.) With a geeky intern-type (Jesse Eisenberg) in tow, Simon and Duck cry tally-ho! Before long the Serbs and others connected to the amorphous United Nations peacekeeping efforts start mistaking these journalists for a CIA hit squad.

The article that inspired the film is a pip. The film itself is about half a pip. The half that works less well sobers us up with Simon’s secret tragedy, and the unassailable seriousness of war crimes and the slaughter of Muslims, not to mention Shepard’s determination to create a Graham Greene saga for our times. While it has some wit and bite, Shepard’s screenplay never fully settles on whether it’s “Under Fire” or “Three Kings” or what.

In his vaguely preening way, Gere is more adept at the serious bits, which means he’s fundamentally at odds with the most interesting material. I like this milieu of the eagerly unethical but inadvertently noble journalist; how could you not? Half the plays and films of the 1920s and early ’30s enshrined the most reckless, ruthless members of the profession, and with the popular image of the reporter in such disrepair, it’d be nice to find an amoral media hero or two on screen again.

As I say: Roughly half a pip. It’s better than none.

mjphillips@tribune.com